2012 Election

See It: Andrew Breitbart's Controversial Obama Race Tape

Before his unexpected death, conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart was chomping at the bit to release a supposedly "explosive" video of President Obama filmed during the president's time at Harvard Law School.

The video was purported to show a young Obama making racially charged comments that Breitbart hoped might damage the president's 2012 reelection bid.

So what was the hold up?

As eager as Breitbart was to bring this supposedly damaging video to light, he told various media outlets that he was waiting to time the release so that it caused maximum damage to the president's campaign.

You snooze you lose.

After Breitbart's passing, many in the media questioned whether the public would ever get to see the right-wing troublemaker's latest secret weapon. The website Buzzfeed answered those questions Wednesday morning when they claimed to have unearthed the scandalous clip.

Buzzfeed posted a video that shows a young Barack Obama speaking in support of a famous Harvard Law professor's fight for increased faculty diversity at Harvard.

The whole video runs just over one minute. It was shot in 1991 when President Obama was 30 years old. The timing means that Obama had already been named president of the Harvard Law Review, and was likely a prominent and popular figure on campus at the time of the video's taping.

The professor that Obama is seen passionately defending is none other than Derrick Bell, famous for being the first black dean of a predominantly white law school. In 1991 Professor Bell created a stir at Harvard when he protested the denial of tenure to female black professor Regina Austin. His protests shed light on the inequity of the hiring practices at many of the nation's top universities at the time.

If the Buzzfeed video is actually the same one Breitbart was hoarding, then it's clear that Breitbart greatly overstated the potential damage to President Obama. Obama's speech in the video is politically charged and impassioned, but it's far from the racist diatribe that Breitbart had built it up to be.

The conservative editors who have taken over Mr. Breitbart's site are claiming that Buzzfeed edited the video down to reduce its impact. They promise to release their version in full on Fox's Sean Hannity show.

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